The Knight of Cups and Following Your Heart

The Knight of Cups is the card people hope for when they ask about love, and the one they argue about most once it turns up. Is he a person on the way? A sign that someone cares? A warning about daydreams? The questions below are the ones readers actually ask about him, and we have tried to answer each one plainly, including where we part company with the usual guides.

What does the Knight of Cups mean?

Start with the picture. In Pamela Colman Smith's drawing, a young knight in armor rides a white horse across open ground. He carries a single cup out in front of him, arm extended, the way you might carry something filled to the brim toward a person waiting at a table. Wings rise from his helmet, and there are wings at his heels too. Ahead of him a stream crosses the land, and beyond it the hills are low and rounded.

Look at the pace before anything else. Some knights in the deck charge or rear. This horse walks. Waite saw the same thing:

Riding quietly. Read it as an instruction for a feeling and it works surprisingly well.

Notice also what he does with the cup. He is not drinking from it, and he is not clutching it to his chest. It goes out ahead of him, where anyone could see it, on its way to being offered. That is the romantic at their best. Not the part of you that waits to be chosen, but the part that brings something: a kind word, a plan for a Saturday, the nerve to say what you feel. Among Waite's meanings for this knight are "invitation" and "proposition", both words of movement.

So the short answer: the Knight of Cups is a picture of approaching something you love, carefully, with your feeling held out in front of you. It turns up for people falling for a person, and just as often for people falling for a course, a house they saw once, or a song they want to write.

Is the Knight of Cups someone coming into my life?

This is the most common reading, and Waite gives it some support. His list of meanings opens with "arrival, approach", and many guides read the card as news of a romantic stranger on the way.

We read it differently. In this magazine the Knight is a picture of something in you, the side of you that approaches, that is moved, that rides out carrying what it feels. A card cannot announce who is coming. It can show you how you come toward things, and that is the part you can do something about.

If you want a prompt from it, try this one. When your mind wanders on the bus or in the shower, where does it go? That is often where your cup is pointing. You don't need to act on it to learn from it.

Does the Knight of Cups mean someone has feelings for me?

No, and we would be doing you a disservice to pretend otherwise. No card can see into another person. The Knight of Cups describes a quality, a way of moving toward love, and it says nothing about who is thinking of you or what they hope.

What it can do is turn the question around. What are you carrying, and toward whom? Is it being offered, or only rehearsed? The Two of Cups shows what happens when two people raise their cups to each other. The Knight shows only one cup on its way. Whether anyone lifts a second cup to meet it belongs to the other person, not to the card, and that is part of what makes an offering real. The Lovers adds that choosing someone, or something, with your whole heart means choosing with your eyes open.

A modest offer is a better test than a reading. A sincere compliment, a coffee, a message to an old friend saying you thought of them. Something given without asking for anything back.

Is the Knight of Cups a warning about daydreaming?

Partly. Waite adds a sentence that is more honest than flattering: "He too is a dreamer," he writes, "but the images of the side of sense haunt him in his vision." His dreams are full of senses, a voice, a face, the warmth of a room he hasn't entered yet.

That is what falling for someone or something often feels like. You fall partly for the person and partly for the pictures you build around them. The pictures are not lies. They tell you what you long for. But they are made in your own mind, and the real person, or the real job, or the real town, will always be a little different from the image you carried in.

If the Seven of Cups is a sky crowded with wishes, the Knight has picked one and set out with it. That is braver than wishing. It also means a meeting with reality is coming, and the kindest thing he can do is let the real thing be real when he gets there.

The picture has its own answer, and it is a little funny. This knight has wings at his helmet and at his heels, as if he could lift off at any moment, and yet he rides a horse that walks on the ground. Let the imagination keep its wings, then, and let the feeling be large and a bit impractical, as long as something reliable is underneath you: sleep, friends who know you, your own values. If you have fallen for an idea, take one real step to meet it in daylight. Visit the place. Ask the question. Talk to the actual person and not to the picture of them.

And the stream is still ahead of him. He has not crossed it yet. Following your heart is rarely one great leap. More often it is a slow approach, with time to see the water, to feel how deep it is, and to decide.

The Knight of Cups card page has his meanings upright and reversed. For the other ranks of the court, see our guide on how to read tarot court cards.

The horse walks so that nothing spills.